Re: [Evolution] using maildir format

[Dr Mark H Phillips <mark phillips trapezegroup com>]

Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > The reason I am trying to move to maildir is that I have
> > a large number of stored emails (which I don't want
> > to delete) and mbox seems not to handle this situation
> > well.
> >     
>
> Are you having some specific problem?
>   
Performance is the main issue.  Although a few years ago
a hard disk problem meant that I lost an entire mbox
file.  (If I had each email in a separate file I may have lost
much less.)

A while ago I tried cutting down mbox size by chopping
off older emails into a separate mbox and trying to use
evolutions import facility to import them.  But the import
facility died on me.  I guess I could try it again and see
if it works now.

> That's a matter of opinion. Maildir was designed to permit multiple
> concurrent updates of a mailbox without locking, and is thus suitable
> for mail stores kept on a fileserver (e.g. NFS). For local mailboxes
> this aspect shouldn't matter. It also follows the one-message-per-file
> model rather than mbox's one-folder-per-file so there may be performance
> differences, but it's not a simple case of one always being better than
> the other.
>   
One-message-per-file sounds like a much more robust
solution.  My understanding is that mbox has long been
regarded as a less than ideal format.
> Maildir was discussed in the last few days on this list. Take a look at
> the archives (http://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/).
>   
Thanks.  I found a thread in August entitled: "How to use
maildir as storage format?"  Is this the thread you meant?
(I couldn't find anything more recent than this.)

It sounds like you can do maildir in evolution, but it is now
restricted to only being used in a special "maildir" account,
not as the local storage for a normal POP account.

It also sounds like there are currently some significant
bugs with maildir.

Maybe I should wait until these have been fixed and until
(hopefully) maildir has been integrated more naturally into
evolution.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,

Mark.